The Forsytes return

Like the movie of L Frank Baum's Wizard of Oz, the BBC's Forsyte Saga was an achievement so monumental that it not merely obliterated its source from view, but almost replaced it. Now, 35 years on, Granada has made its own Forsyte Saga, an entirely new adaptation of a Victorian epic written, as we very probably do need reminding, by John Galsworthy. If you want to irritate an ITV executive, ask why they thought a remake was necessary. As the new Forsyte Saga's producer, Sita Williams, told a rapturous preview audience at Bafta in Piccadilly this week, no one is ever accused of "remaking" Pride and Prejudice.

When it airs next month, ITV1 will doubtless sell the story of Victorian England's least attractive family as a tale of hypocrisy and money, adultery and revenge, sex and power. As Soames Forsyte, the brother with, in Galsworthy's words, a "habitual sniff on his face", Damian Lewis will be the guy we love to hate. Gina McKee, as his unfortunate wife Irene, will become a pin-up. Rupert Graves, as the reckless Jolyon Forsyte, will compete as chief hunk with Ioan Gruffudd, who plays the impetuous, penniless Bosinney. Think Dallas with top hats, not stetsons. Think EastEnders with the dropped aitches restored.

Yet viewers are not daft. It will be obvious that this is television drama of a different order from the crime doubles, comedy- dramas and Robson Green vehicles that dumb us down so far that our bums feel the springs in our sofas. Lovingly directed, wittily scripted, subtly acted, the ITV Forsyte Saga is a throwback to the aspirations of Donald Wilson's BBC adaptation: to make a classic text live.

And how it lived! In 1967, when it was transmitted, most of Britain got by on two channels. Only eight million had the third, BBC2. Of those, however, six million stayed in every Saturday night for six months to view it. The next year, 18 million followed the repeats on BBC1. This was an age before water coolers and water-cooler conversations, but the Monday after Soames raped Irene there was only one discussion in the line before the nation's tea trolleys. Eric Porter's name was mud. Kenneth More's career revived. Nyree Dawn Porter's name - or names - were made. At a time when Alf Garnett and the Wednesday Play were infuriating the moral majority, the serial was the licence fee's very justification.

As importantly, the classic serial became a BBC franchise, its superiority remaining unchallenged until Granada delivered Brideshead Revisited 14 years later. At the screening, Granada was not slow to make the Brideshead comparison. The audience, an old-fashioned assembly of classical actors and Oxbridge arts graduates of a certain vintage, must have wanted to pinch itself. That very day the BBC chairman had been scolding its "southern, white, middle-class, middle-aged and welleducated" bedrock audience. ITV had suddenly fallen in love with it.

Of course, ITV's Forsyte Saga is not really to be compared to the BBC's. It dramatises only the first three novels in the series and Galsworthy wrote nine: no Fleur, no Susan Hampshire. The BBC's adaptation ran for 21 hours. ITV has made only six 75-minute episodes so far, although more will be filmed later this year. Yet, and let me stick my neck out: this is a better Forsyte Saga than the BBC's (and even I almost wrote, "the original").

Watching the early episodes now, one wonders how the 49-year-old More was ever accepted as the 32-year-old Jolyon, or who thought it a good idea that for the first four minutes More should read us the story in voiceover. The sets, remarkably detailed for the time, now look cramped and studiobound. Technical flaws proliferate. During one intense conversation a studio hand can be heard coughing off-screen. Before Soames opens the door and views for the first time the love of his life, Irene, his coat slides off the coat stand outside; no one thought to ask for a second take.

Williams's adaptation, in contrast, is a glossy film production that opens the story up, not just into London clubland but unto the fresh air of, for example, Bournemouth Pier. Its scenes are shorter, make their points unerringly. The result is pacy, cinematic.

Sita Williams believes the story's themes will appeal especially to our times. "What it is about is property, ownership, money - all the things we're interested in now much more than in the Sixties when people were protesting about the Vietnam War." Its great subject, however, is the family as a fatally flawed institution. The Forsytes, Galsworthy wrote, were a family "between no three members of whom existed anything worthy of the name of sympathy". It could almost have been them Edmund Leach was thinking of when he shockingly announced in his 1967 Reith Lecture: "Far from being the basis of good society, the family, with its narrow privacy and tawdry secrets, is the source of all our discontents."

The Forsytes, you see, may dress in sobriety and crinoline, but theirs is a thoroughly subversive saga. Its reincarnation as respectable family viewing was an irony in 1967. Today ITV1 is more desperate for viewers than even BBC2 was then. That it has turned to this particular anticapitalist tract to deliver viewers to advertisers is a still-greater paradox. As a suit murmured aloud as Bafta's academicians retired to the bar to celebrate in the traditional way the wising up of television: "I just hope they watch."